I met Jeffrey Siu at my friend Josh’s birthday party. Josh is a designer, his wife Isobel is a fashion designer, and Jeffrey, their friend visiting from Milan, consults on design for C.P. Company while bootstrapping a label of his own on the side: Field Journal. Jeffrey’s showing me photos on his phone. I see Field Journal creates backpacks, jackets, and oversized workwear jeans. All with awesome silhouettes. I’d done VFX on a Stone Island spot, so it was easy to talk techwear. My bold roommate was a great hype man and said, “Well, you two should make something.” Jeffrey, in town for ten more days, was down.
This is the most complete creative-direction job I’ve done. I spent a few days on a vision board and scripts, a set of fashion scenarios written loose enough to DIY on a hybrid stills-and-video day blasting around the South Bay. I got to make something real for a real brand, and Jeffrey got media for a label he was funding himself.
The thread I was pulling on: Jeffrey’s work is grounded, enriched-craftsman techwear, urban without being sci-fi. I kept thinking about what it means to be an honest person in a surveillance state. I was swirling the comic series Transmetropolitan and fun, kinetic cinema. So the setups played with that energy: existing inside watched, urban spaces, and subverting them.
The hero setup, which I called Spycraft, we shot at an indie storage facility in Redondo Beach, so liminal and cool. Its lobby had a comically big and obvious security camera, twenty-foot floor-to-ceiling mirrors with nothing extruding from them but alarm systems, an elevator up to a storage floor with a view of the semi-operational power plant (if you know the area, you’ll geotag it). I cut it in a thriller-narrow aspect ratio, over the Ocean’s Eleven soundtrack “$160 Million Chinese Man.” Luke Orlando, a director friend with a cinematography background and a great eye for this tone of work, shot it; he kept finding Dutch angles that stretched the frames and evoked the comic/manga that we both love. My actor friend Danny Cron modeled, bringing the whole mood alive.
I was inspired to do the duplication setup from the AMIRI job (that story is on this site too), scored with something uncanny and a little whimsical. Jeffrey ended up using the two hero videos. The thing that never ran anywhere official is my favorite: I took sequences of Danny into Photoshop and turned them into comic-strip pages. Nobody asked for them. I found them noodling in post. I love them. They’re below.